Dark Things I Adore

by Katie Lattari

  “Sure, we’ll see what we can do.” I nod, playing along.

  “Nice to meet you, Juniper,” Brady says to me, sincere enough.

  “You, too,” I reply. As they head off down the trail, Coral turns around to look at me for a moment, but I can’t read her expression. Maybe I never could. Soon, they disappear, hand in hand, and I am alone. I take a breath.

  Why has Coral never mentioned Brady?

  Why doesn’t Brady like Mantis?

  I need to talk to Moss.

  I walk up onto the Ledge, gathering myself, the wind pulling higher the more exposed I get. The endless sea of green forest and slender stripes of road beyond and beneath me are spread out like a child’s playset. The great puddle Moosehead Lake makes down below has me feeling bigger than big. Smaller than small.

  I turn to go a few minutes later, the clouds and sky starting to rapidly darken toward gray, and pass Lovers’ Tree, emblazoned with rough, archaic initials. I look for a C+B or a B+C but don’t find them.

  ***

  “Yeah, of course I know. They’ve been dating for, like, two or three years,” Moss says to me, totally unfazed, bored almost as he wolfs down his stew. He’s sitting cross-legged on top of his desk. I’m sitting on the edge of his bed with my own bowl of cooling supper. Rain is pelting against the windows, the outside steel gray but for the glowing windows of other cabins in the distance.

  “You knew Coral had a boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Named Brady Bouchard?”

  “Yes,” he says, mouth full, flipping through some used sketch paper under his thigh. I’m deflated.

  “Damn—I really thought I was bringing some good intel, here,” I admit.

  “I totally appreciate you,” he says, tipping the bowl against his lips and draining the last of his stew, wiping his face with his wrist. He puts the bowl down beside him on the desk. “But—yeah. We talk about everything. She tells me everything, Junie. It’s like—wild. Her family, her school days, her past. Like, did you know she has manic depression?” He looks elated. Astonished. I have never seen Moss so into something. Like he’s telling me the trading card stats of his favorite baseball player. My appetite has left me.

  “I mean…I sensed something was up the day of the scavenger hunt. But—I didn’t know know,” I say, pushing the stew around in my bowl.

  “She tried slitting her fucking wrists in November. This past November.” His eyes sparkle. He thrusts his own wrists out toward me and slashes a finger across each in turn. “Think of how much blood there must have been. Think of how, even after she felt the pain on her first wrist, she kept going on her second!”

  “Jesus, Moss.” I wince, holding my hand up as if to say easy. I think of the snowy, papery skin under the cuffs of her sweater. It’s fragile enough as it is.

  “Yeah, dude. Brady and her parents were, like, down the hall. Having a grand old time, a lovely dinner, licking each other’s assholes for all I know.” He laughs. “Meanwhile, she’s over in the bathroom, doing that. Ruining her mom’s towels.” The image makes me queasy. His ease with all of it makes me queasy. I set my bowl down on the wood-plank floor. “And there’s more where that came from.”

  I can feel my brow is creased. I press my hands between my knees and look down into the floor. It’s so hot in here. It’s always so goddamned hot in here.

  “There is?” I ask him. “More?” He nods solemnly.

  “She’s been through a lot. Put herself through a lot,” he says. “She tells me about it.”

  “But she doesn’t still…you know. Hurt herself?” I ask, wondering if it’s something I’ll have to go to Gus about. Moss hesitates.

  “No,” he says, pushing his bowl around on his desk. “Not so much anymore. She’s got a whole regimen. Therapy. Pills.” I swallow and nod, feeling relieved. “She doesn’t like the pills too much.” He laughs gently. His eyes wander to a stack of sketches and paintings on his desk.

  “But if they help.” I shrug.

  “Right,” he says, pinching his lip between his fingers, looking down at the floor. “But stuff like that only helps in a certain way, you know? They don’t just fix a person. And not everything—not everybody—needs to be fixed. But anyway, she’s okay, Junie. She has peaks and valleys, she told me. But she knows how to cope and deal with it. She’s been dealing with it for a long time. Trust me.”

  I nod, breathe in deeply through my nose. Beautiful, brilliant Rita fills my mind. My ex doesn’t believe in much, but she sure as hell believes in modern medicine. She was always really open about how grateful she was for the little white antidepressant tablets she took every day.

  But that’s Rita. I guess Moss would know better than me how Coral is. “In other news: Brady does not seem to like Mantis.”

  “Who does?” Moss replies, dismissive.

  “Brady, like, purposefully keeps his distance, though. And I think he’d prefer it if Coral did, too.” His eyes flick to me, suddenly invested again.

  “Oh, yeah?” he asks. I nod. “Interesting,” he murmurs.

  Silence settles between us. We’re lost in our own thoughts.

  “Are you okay?” I ask after a while. “You look tense.”

  “I’m fine.” He waves me off. He’s biting his thumbnail.

  “You’re sure?”

  He looks at me like his square, fretting older sister who just doesn’t get it. He shakes his head and sighs, smiling just the littlest bit. He unfolds himself off the top of his desk and stretches.

  “Gonna eat that stew or what?”

  I look down at it. It’s starting to congeal. I shake my head no, a little nauseous. He ruffles my hair as he walks past and takes the bowl for himself, unaffected. Ravenous.

  June 23, 1988

  The distance from our two large canoes to shore is probably about a quarter mile. Zephyr is sitting in the middle seat between me and Mantis, cradling a boom box that’s screaming out X-Ray Spex across the water. Mantis is on one paddle, I’m on the other. We’re in the canoe closer to Kress Beach, the sandy bit of shoreline that’s part of the thirty-acre Lupine Valley property. No one is on shore even though the temperatures have finally started to climb. It’s far enough away from the village—a mile and a half through the woods—that students venture down on only the hottest days of the year. Mantis had said, This place is wasted on you people, and so we wanted to show him it wasn’t. So we’re here. Well, not all of us. Trillium, Ash, and Barley are on a side quest of their own to Quebec City. Gone for a few days.

  Coral and Moss trail behind us by fifteen or twenty yards, each of them with a paddle. They’ve been bickering for the last five minutes, their voices echoey and indistinct on the water, sometimes totally smudged out by the boom box just in front of me. Each time I turn my head back to look at them, it’s like a new frame in a comic strip:

  Coral trying to direct Moss on the paddle.

  Moss snapping at her as they begin turning their canoe in a circle.

  Moss crossing his arms over his chest huffily when she tells him he’s not doing it right.

  Coral half standing in the canoe as she tries to reach for his paddle, frustrated.

  Moss on his paddle again, but sullen and silent.

  All of this underscored by Poly Styrene’s deeply English voice shouting about bondage.

  Eventually we’re all settled into our paddling rhythms, heading nowhere in particular. Mantis gestures and narrates points of interest around the lake. An eagle’s nest. The rough site of the largest fish he’s ever caught. A few minutes later, I look behind us and see that Coral and Moss have fallen way behind. They’re not even paddling. They’re talking. A good half football field away from us.

  “I’ve got to keep my eye on the prize here, Zeph. But do some spying for me.” I smile. “What is going on in the mighty vessel behind us?” Zephyr t
urns herself completely around on the middle bench so she’s facing me in the stern, her eyes looking over my shoulder.

  “They’re not even moving.” She chuckles, her nose stud glinting in the sunlight. “They’re…talking. They look mad, maybe?” I see Mantis in the prow turn to look over his shoulder for a moment, trying to see what Zephyr is seeing. “Yes, they look mad. I think they’re arguing.”

  “About the canoe, you think? I don’t think Moss is exactly the outdoorsy type,” I say. Zephyr’s face squints, relaxes, smiles, then grows more serious, and I can tell she’s watching something nasty unfold between Moss and Coral. Then, as if on cue, I can hear the faint, angry lilt of explosive voices over the water, but I can’t make out what’s being said. Zephyr turns off the boom box, sets it down by her feet. Mantis stops paddling and turns around. So do I.

  They’re yelling at each other—Moss’s face emanating something savage, Coral’s face reflecting hurt. Their voices are raised, their arms gesticulating. Then Coral stands up and points down at Moss.

  A silence.

  Moss barks, furious, but doesn’t dare stand up in the canoe with her.

  “Cindy!” Mantis calls. I turn forward to see his hands cupped around his mouth, his face pissed. I rotate back to look at Coral and Moss, but they don’t seem to have registered Mantis. They’re back to screaming at each other, their bodies on fire.

  “Cindy! Everything alright back there?” Mantis shouts again, getting antsy, our canoe rocking as he shifts inside it. I brace my arms on the sides, almost dropping my paddle. I grab it and pull it inside with us. Suddenly, a silence has fallen over the lake. I turn to look back once more.

  Coral is still and quiet, her arms at her sides, staring Moss dead in the eyes. The fight out of her. Moss is coiled like an animal ready to strike. His lips move, speaking in a lower voice that we cannot hear.

  Coral goes slack. A cornstalk gone to seed. Pale, gray yellow. Leaning.

  And then I realize she really is leaning. Too far. She’s falling backward. Letting herself fall backward. My mouth opens to cry out, but no sound comes, all the muscles in my body seizing. Zephyr lets out a little shriek. Mantis lurches in the canoe.

  Coral falls over the side of the canoe into the water, arms spread out like a child trying to make a snow angel. The splash is barely audible from where we are. Moss’s face is wide open in shock. He clutches the canoe as it rocks wildly from her departure. She floats on her back in the wake of the canoe like Ophelia for several long moments. And then she goes under. The flutter of her pale hair is the last thing we see.

  “Cindy!” Mantis cries, paddle digging desperately into the water, turning us around at a painfully slow rate. I finally come to my senses and take up my paddle and begin to help him, the cold water slapping up at us. I look out over the blue-green ripples beside Moss and his canoe and don’t see her. Moss peers over the edge of the canoe but does not jump in after her. He doesn’t even reach his arm down into the depths so that he might try to grasp some trailing piece of her clothing.

  A terrible thought crosses my mind. Did he push her?

  I shake it away. No. I would have seen that. I would have seen his hand on her. We were looking. We were all looking. Why would I think that? The questions ball in my throat, but I cannot speak them. Mantis and I paddle, all of us oddly silent in the shock of it, in our mission to get back to Coral, the canoe. Moss is still looking over the edge.

  “Do you see her?” Mantis shouts to him. “Do you see her, Moss?”

  Moss lifts his head, as if waking from a dream. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t shake his head or nod his head or duck his head in any way that indicates anything.

  “Moss, you son of a bitch!” Mantis shouts, and it’s furious now, not just panicked. “Get in there! Get the fuck in there! Do you see her?”

  My heart is racing, my arms on fire. The lake looks so still all around Moss’s boat. Around Moss. Still, baffled, alone.

  And then she breaches. Coral. Her head pops up maybe ten yards away from the canoe Moss sits in. She gasps, her arms grappling with the surface of the lake, sopping and heavy in her gray hoodie.

  “Jesus, fuck,” Mantis breathes, a new kind of vigor in his paddling.

  “Oh, thank goodness.” Zephyr’s voice is shaky. Coral seems to gather herself as we draw ever nearer, her arms treading water in wide circles. She looks at Moss in his boat. Then at us approaching. She looks tired. She keeps looking between the two canoes—Moss near but unmoving. Mantis closing in but furious.

  Between the devil and the deep, blue sea. The line springs to mind, unbidden.

  She seems to sigh. As if disappointed. As if exhausted. Her eye tics.

  She closes her eyes, and her lips.

  She lets her arms go still, and she begins to sink.

  She doesn’t fight it.

  She slides back beneath the surface of the water.

  “What the hell is she doing?” An acidic edge of panic is buried in Zephyr’s cry.

  “Coral, we’re coming for you!” I call out, useless, pathetic. She can’t hear me under there. I think of her heavy clothes, her Bean boots, so like Brady’s. She doesn’t appear; there’s barely a trace of her. Just the bubbles percolating on the surface above her. I keep paddling. Mantis is stripping off his boots.

  “When I get out, get this canoe up alongside the other one. Having both together will stabilize things better for when we get back in.” I nod at Mantis and then he’s over the side of the canoe, almost taking us with him. Zephyr and I hold on for dear life as the canoe struggles to find its equilibrium. Zephyr takes up Mantis’s paddle, and we make our way over the final fifteen or twenty yards to Moss, who just sits, dumbstruck.

  Mantis dives under. Zephyr clutches my hand, on the edge of tears. My eyes scan the ripples madly, and phantom shapes reveal themselves, not one of them Mantis or Coral.

  It must only be seconds that pass—long, eerie seconds—but it feels like an eternity before their water-warped shapes start to billow and bloat toward the surface, pale skin and dark clothes conjuring something not quite human. They breach in a frantic spray, gasping, arms flailing. Mantis shakes Coral to rouse her, slams his hand against her back hard as she chokes out water. I extend my paddle out to them, and Mantis grabs it immediately, holding on to Coral, and I pull them in. He instructs us on how to balance and brace the neighboring canoes so they can get in. He tells Zephyr to get in with Moss, voice gruff, breaths straining. He pushes and I pull Coral’s rag doll body inside. Then I help him in. They both sprawl awkwardly in the bottom of the canoe, drenched, at my feet. Coral’s chest is heaving, her eyes lightly closed, her skin a sickly white. But she’s alive and breathing. Mantis leaves his forearm draped over his eyes for a few moments, catching his breath.

  “Moss—you little—fuck!” he gasps. “What is—the matter with you?” Mantis tears his arm away from his face and pushes himself up in the canoe to sit, his bulk jostling us again. Moss looks truly cowed for the first time since I’ve known him.

  “I’m not a great swimmer—” Moss tries, but the line and his voice are feeble.

  “You would have let her die, you shit.” Mantis’s face is cragged in fury, eyes scorching. “You understand that, Cindy? He would have let you fucking die.” He glares at Coral now, but she’s looking unwaveringly into the sky from the floor of the canoe, detached, removed, heaving. “How stupid can you be? I mean, truly?” He digs a finger into his ear and flicks some water out.

  “Why don’t we go easy—” My words are shaky, my heart in my throat.

  “Go easy? Go easy?” Mantis barks. “She’s been pulling this shit for years!” His voice echoes around us. I swallow, silenced. “I’ve gone easy, that’s what you all don’t understand. This whole fucking town has, and look who is still fucking here, driving me fucking crazy. Isn’t that right, Cindy?” His eyes fall back on her sprawled, soppi
ng form. I can’t tell if some of the droplets on her face are tears now; her eyes look pink. “If you’re going to do it, then just get it fucking over with, because I can’t—” He shakes his head, fuming. Voice clipped. “You don’t die without my say-so, got it?” Silence settles on all of us, bound tautly together in our congealed fear and shock at what just happened.

  “Alright—maybe we should—” I start, anxious to diffuse Mantis and get us to shore in one piece. Mantis’s eyes clear as if he realizes what he just said, and they ping across our expressions, Cindy’s blank face. Something releases in him, the tension loosening into something wrung out.

  “She’s the only person on the planet who can get me so worked the fuck up. Shit.” Mantis runs his hands up and down his face. Zephyr and I look at each other worriedly. “Look—I’m sorry, C. I’m sorry. You just scared me so much. And I care about you so much. I didn’t mean it at all, I’m sorry.” He’s looking off into the water as he speaks, as if unable to bear looking at her. Coral says nothing.

  “Why don’t we just focus on getting back to the beach?” Zephyr says now, her voice managing to sound both authoritative and calm.

  “Yeah, why don’t we,” Mantis rumbles, taking up a paddle from beside Coral’s body, almost accidentally hitting her with it. She’s still looking straight up into the sky, which is soft and gentle as blue hydrangea. I turn to Moss and see he’s looking at her. His face chalky and still.

  Twenty or so minutes later, we’ve made it to Kress Beach and Mantis has started a fire on its shore. Coral’s down to her underwear, bra, and camisole, standing right next to the flames. Almost too close. So close, I’m afraid a stray ember will land on her thin, birch-like arms or her wing-like clavicles and singe holes right into the very center of her. That one ember is all it would take. I’m shaken looking at her. Bruised color blooms on her naked legs, prints her upper arms, a map of pain. I have never seen so much of her body before.

  “What’s with all the bruises, Cor?” Zephyr asks her, as if we are processing the visual in tandem. Alarm etches my love’s face, but she keeps her voice calm and level. Mantis and I are wringing Coral’s clothes out and hanging them on rocks and pieces of driftwood near the fire to dry. My eyes skitter between my work and Coral, heart thudding in my chest.